It doesn't quite match 's $1 billion Intercloud announcement, but is making a strong bet on the . The chipmaker just made a "significant" equity investment in Cloudera and is pushing a "broad strategic technology and business collaboration."

With that, Intel is Cloudera's largest strategic shareholder and will install an executive on the board of directors. Although financial terms of the investment were not disclosed, Intel said the Cloudera bet is its single largest data center tech investment in the company's history.

"By aligning the Cloudera and Intel road maps, we are creating the platform of choice for big data analytics," said Diane Bryant, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Data Center Group. "We expect to accelerate industry adoption of the Hadoop data platform and enable companies to mine their data for insights that inform the business. This collaboration spans our data center technology from compute to network, and , and extends to our initiatives for the Internet of Things."

Who Does What?

Cloudera's analytic data management , which is powered by Apache Hadoop, will join together with data center architecture based on Intel Xeon technology to drive customer adoption of Big Data Solutions. The goal is to make it easier for companies large and small to pull more business value from data via open-source Apache Hadoop solution deployments.

Cloudera's part of the deal is to develop and optimize its distribution for Intel architecture as its preferred platform. The distribution will also support next-generation technologies like Intel fabrics, security and flash memory. Intel's part is to market and promote Cloudera's CDH and Cloudera Enterprise to its clients as its preferred Hadoop platform.

"Hadoop has changed the entire conversation around data," said Cloudera CEO Tom Reilly. "Based on our ability to store, process and analyze all kinds of data, increasingly in new ways, the potential for advances in business, social and economic environments are vast."

What this Really Means

Intel has committed to focusing its engineering and marketing resources on the joint road map. Specifically, the optimizations from Intel's Distribution for Apache Hadoop/Intel Data Platform (IDH/IDP) will be integrated into CDH and IDH/IDP. That integration will show up after the v3.1 release at the end of March.

So how will the collaboration between Cloudera and Intel better the Intel-based data center and Internet of Things (IoT) technology initiatives? According to the companies, by making it possible for customers to manage and analyze -generated data from a variety of sources, from sensors to gateways and various devices.

Reilly put it this way: "The result is rapid performance improvements on workloads such as those extracting intelligent insight. Intel's vision for delivering open, performance-optimized solutions for big data is synergistic to our vision to help companies accelerate time to achieving success."